The exhibition XXth Century Objects : Future Antiques places Sammy Engramer’s work in line with the artists supported by Claudine Papillon. Dieter Roth and Erik Dietman (to quote the most famous) are also inventors of humble objects which worth as much for their potential, their openness, as for their distinct contents. On the borderline between significance and insignificance, the exchange function takes precedence over the code and these artists don't consider grandiloquence without a laughable counterpart.
Engramer suggests us visions, without the pretense to give to the spectator what we’d call over-clever, over-critical, or over-speculative over-works. Not to pursue the idea of a "masterpiece" : it could end up being a loss of energy and an artificial attitude. There actually is a logic, but the demonstration is not demonstrative.
His exhibition could then gather a weird selection of futuristic flashes and play on words turned into volume.
It’s up to Engramer to reset antiques (no more, no less), sleeping symbols of history, in public space, in common imaginary, and thus turn them into objects of desire.
"We are all here in the middle of things which we ignore the value of. Besides, their rank in the hierarchy of objects doesn't matter. Here we are among them, in a gift box".
Damien Airault, october 2011


For his second exhibition in Galerie Claudine Papillon, along the same line as the previous, Sammy Engramer welcomes us with an arrogant Magriterie that enlightens the whole in a humorous soft light.

In spite of its seeming eclecticism, Sammy Engramer's work is the result of a conscientious selection in art history. His pieces therefore all recall, each one in its own way, one or several aesthetic trends, turning them gently but radically upside down:

- A Malevitch scandalously treated in the manner of old century ladies haircrafts
- Two Duchamp, which summ up to a squared iconoclasm
- Play on words taking after Dada and taking us aback
- An allusion to dull constructivism, disguised as a gag
- A course of architecture applied to art history, but still usefull as a lamp
- Many squares and just as many cubes, perfect exhibition spaces shown inside our place with a chinese box structure
- Flat interpretations of buildings : maps streched on canvas become paintings
- Volume interpretations of buildings, perfect and concrete shelf for a thematic library
- Holyness perceived by miracle in the usual basic shapes
- Furniture returned to function altought showed as a work of art
- Real and almost conventional landscape
- For the young, a videogames hero, who stole the show to the man in the moon, and a signed usable QR-code.

A stakhanovist of theory tested by forms, Sammy Engramer works over the conceptual landscape set on since the advent of modernity includings its inner contradictions, almost in all directions. The matching between pieces exhibited here shows clear preference for the most decisive turning points of art history, breaking points and revolutions, at the expense of all half-hearted currents and various mannerisms.